By "Buckshawt" McCollum
First off, I'd like to say that when NCSoft claims City of Villains as a stand alone game, they aren't kidding. If you've played the original City of Heroes, there are plenty of fresh new additions into the formula to give even Hero of the City (L50) Heroes something to look forward to. Or to fear.
It starts off with the brand new Archetypes. While there are obvious similarities between Villain and Hero archetypes, they are alike in the words of Magneto, "Only in the vaguest sense". The following is an outline of the new Archetypes
Brutes
Like tankers, only "Hulk-Smash"ier. Brutes retain the same two starting pool sets (Melee and Defense) and like Tankers are able to take a lot of abuse before they slow down. The thing with Brutes is, however, that they do not slow down. They speed up the longer they remain engulfed in battle. Thanks to the new Fury skill, and the Rage bar, Brutes gain the ability to do rude amounts of damage.
Stalkers
Most easily compared to the Scrappers of Paragon City, the main differance between these two archetypes is the loss of the Critical Hit ability, and the gain of Assasination. Whether you're a katana wielding dragon Ninja or a claw-sprouting chain entwined madman, the first power in your defensive set will always be "Hide". When attacks are made from the cloaking of the Hide power, you do massive damage with your first strike. This "from the shadows" striking ability can be further upgraded by selecting skills that specifically derive bonuses from it, such as "Assasin's Claw". Stalkers are still pretty scrappy though, retaining that Glass Chainsaw feel, and overall are good for a Solo experience.
Masterminds
Masterminds are a new Archetype entirely. There is no Echo of this Archetype in City of Heroes. All the primary power sets for this archetype are brand new, and very cool. The Mastermind is a back-seat villain, instead of stepping into the fray themselves they command groups of minions to fight for them. Masterminds are a very cool archetype, allowing you at higher levels to use your minions as suicide bombers depending on your secondary power set and other useful tricks. Masterminds can command Robots, Zombies, Ninjas, or Mercenaries. All with their own strengths, weaknesses, and special abilities.
Corrupters
You gotta have the ranged guys, too y'know. Corrupters closely mirror their CoH echo the Blaster. While a few cool new power sets help to spice up the variety of Corrupters you'll see, theres also the new ability "Scourge". Scourge is a flipped around version of the Blaster power "Defiance". When your enemy is low in health, Scourge will kick in and do much higher damage than regular attacks. This is especially useful on Boss characters.
Dominators
Dominators are the close relative of the Controller, retaining many of the same power sets such as gravity control and mind control, but adding one or two surprises with power sets such as "Plant Control". The obligatory Buff/Debuff of the group with an interesting new twist.
After you've chosen your body type and your powers, it's time to make your very own distinctive avatar. Even if you havent played an MMORPG before, you've probobly heard somewhere about City of Heroes' legendary costume creation mode that sported enough depth to actually make it fun enough to be a legitimate departure from the levelling up and mission running. City of Villains is differant. If you thought the amount of options you had when making a Hero was ridiculous, just wait until you see what kind of dastardly evil-doer you can come up with in just a few minutes with this system. Its awe-inspiring the amount of choices that can be made for every last stitch of clothing. If you dont particularly like spending half an hour at a time designing your costume, all the basic options are at your disposal. Werewolf, Zombie, Lizard-man, you name it.
After passing through the naming process and entering the game, you'll notice that the UI is congruent with City of Heroes, making it easy to jump straight into for veterans, and beginners alike. The easy to master interface places all your powers, enhancements, and inspirations at your fingertips with removable and customizable windows for as much or as little information onscreen as per your personal preference.
The actual gameplay of City of Villains remains true to the saying "If it aint broke, dont fix it" However, this does not mean that the game is entirely the same as City of Heroes. For example, the missions are much better, and not all of them are entirely randomized as some of the City of Heroes ones were. "Run in, slap some generic thugs, run out". Spicing up your missions will be cut-scenes, for example. Taking a page from one other successful title they created, Guild Wars, City of Villains will sport cinematic cut-scenes during some missions. While these arent completely worthless, they dont do much from what I've seen to lend any particularly useful information to the player entering the mission, but they're short enough and interesting to watch so that they arent a pain to sit through. All in all, I find that though they may not have been exactly neccesary, the cut-scenes help to freshen the experience and add to the overall quality. Among these new bells and whistles, you will find ragdoll physics. Yes. I said it. Ragdoll physics. While not every enemy type sports this, you will find that any given Skulls gang member in Mercy City will slump over after that finishing blow to the gut. In the build I played, Ragdoll did not behave perfectly and still needed some polishing up, but it did make for some hilarious and dirty screenshots and all in all, deserves to be there for the pure coolness of ragdoll in an MMO.
The structure of the new missions is a vast improvement over City of Heroes, which threw huge riotous crowds of nameless lackeys at you left and right. In City of Heroes, you wont have to look far for your first named boss. In fact, you'll find some in the first mission you ever do for Arachnos. The enemy count is reduced for one-man missions, and the difficulty is upped yielding more of a challenge, higher experience gains, and a better and less frustrating mission altogether. You may actually be forced to use inspirations to complete a mission, thus making management of enhancements and inspirations a vital part of mission-taking strategy. While you can solo fairly easily from the very beginning, you may also take advantage of the strengths of other villains and dive straight into deep party based gameplay. Enemies are as varied as the players are, providing a deeper level of gameplay than City of Heroes, which gave every enemy both melee and ranged attacks. In City of Villains, some enemies may wield swords, while others have throwing knives, thus making them better at ranged attacks, but having to resort to frail close range attacks in an emergency. All of this flows seamlessly during gameplay, and feels entirely natural once you learn the attack patterns of your foes.
Another, entirely new feature for the series is base creation. While I myself didnt get the chance to play with this, I did see certain, very interesting aspects of it. For example, just like you collect enhancements and inspirations from fallen foes, you can now also collect whats called Salvage. Salvage is used to forge items to help defend your base and repel invaders, as well as provide buffs to supergroup members. Some examples of Supergroup buffs include XP Bonuses, XP Debt Decreases, Damage Increases, and Regeneration Boosts just for being in Supergroup mode while you have these special items in your base. This too helps to deepen the experience and make for a much more varied and enjoyable game.
The only problems I can voice over City of Villains, were expectable lag issues. Obviously the game being in beta, it still hasn't been able to see the real CoH Servers yet, and realistic server loads. So it'll be impossible to predict just how they'll behave once CoV goes live. In addition to being able to play on Hero servers, character slots will be increased from 8 to 12. Each slot can be either Hero or Villain.
Also, missions seem to be placed quite a ways away even at the beginning levels, making travel powers an absolute neccesity to forego long, boring runs across zones. I have yet to see any mode of Rogue Isle transportation.
Unfortunately, NCsoft's support of PvP testing has been scarce and I haven't yet been able to try out this aspect of the game yet. More info when the final version of the game is shipped October 28'th. Until then, see you next time. Same Buckshawt time. Same Buckshawt channel!
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